The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (13 page)

Even when agreements were reached, the process left behind a residue of bitterness and mistrust. When Britain made difficulties in 1898 in the negotiations over the Portuguese colonies, the Kaiser wrote an irate memorandum: ‘Lord Salisbury’s conduct is quite Jesuitical, monstrous and insolent!’
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The British for their part deeply resented the way the Germans exploited Britain’s preoccupation with the deteriorating situation in southern Africa to make Britain negotiate in the first place. Salisbury, who did not share Chamberlain’s enthusiasm for a broad alliance with Germany, told the German ambassador, ‘You ask too much for your friendship.’
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The following year Germany threatened to withdraw its ambassador from London when Salisbury balked at giving way to German demands over the Samoan islands. The Kaiser impetuously sent an extraordinarily rude letter to his grandmother criticising her Prime Minister. ‘This way of treating Germany’s interests and feelings has come upon the people like an electric shock, and has evoked the impression that Lord Salisbury cares no more for us than for Portugal, Chile or the Patagonians.’ And he added a threat: ‘If this sort of high-handed treatment of German
affairs by Lord Salisbury’s Government is suffered to continue, I am afraid that there will be a permanent source of misunderstandings and recriminations between the two nations, which may in the end lead to bad blood.’
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The old queen, after consulting Salisbury, replied very firmly indeed: ‘The tone in which you write about Lord Salisbury I can only attribute to a temporary irritation on your part, as I do not think you would otherwise have written in such a manner, and I doubt whether any Sovereign ever wrote in such terms to another Sovereign, and that Sovereign his own Grandmother about their Prime Minister.’
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The Boer War produced fresh tensions. The German government actually played a helpful role in refusing to join a coalition of powers to force Britain to make peace with the two Boer republics. Germany did not receive as much credit as it might have done in part because of the condescending and high-handed tone Bülow among others adopted with Britain. As Friedrich von Holstein, the effective head of the German Foreign Office, said later: ‘By acting in friendly manner and speaking in an unfriendly one, we fell between two stools (for “we” read “Bülow”).’
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Moreover, the fact that the German public, from the empress down, was largely pro-Boer confirmed the perception in Britain that Germany was working actively for British defeat. Rumours circulated that German officers were enlisting in the Boer armies when in fact the Kaiser had forbidden them to take part. In the opening months of the war, Britain seized three German mail steamers suspected, wrongly as it turned out, of carrying war materiel to the Boers. (One, according to the German diplomat Eckardstein, had nothing more dangerous than boxes of Swiss cheese.) When the British were slow to release the ships, the German government charged Britain with violating international law and used threatening language. Bülow, who wanted to keep the talks with Chamberlain alive for the time being, wrote to the then Chancellor Gottfried von Hohenlohe: ‘The acuteness and depth of Germany’s unfortunate dislike of Britain are most dangerous to us. If the British public clearly realized the anti-British feeling which dominates Germany just now, a great revulsion would occur in its conception of the relations between Britain and Germany.’
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In fact the British public were aware of the feeling in Germany because the British press reported it in detail. The establishment Athenaeum Club in London had a special display of German cartoons and anti-British articles.
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While it is difficult to measure in an age before opinion surveys, it does seem as though elite opinion in each country, whether in foreign offices, parliaments, or the military, was hardening against the other by the start of the twentieth century.
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And there was a new and, for many in ruling circles, disconcerting factor in the growing importance of public opinion. ‘The least ill humour toward us prevails in the higher circles of society, perhaps also in the lower classes of the population, the mass of the workers,’ Count Paul Metternich, who succeeded Hatzfeldt as German ambassador in London, reported to Berlin in 1903. ‘But of all those that lie in between, and who work with brain and pen, the great majority are hostile to us.’
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Loud public demands for the German government to do something about Britain or that the British government stand up to Germany not only put pressure on the decision-makers but limited how far they could go in working with the other country.

Samoa, for example, was a crisis that need not have happened because no great national interests were at stake. Yet it proved unnecessarily difficult to resolve because of public agitation, especially in Germany. ‘For even though the great majority of our pothouse politicians did not know whether Samoa was a fish or a fowl or a foreign queen’, said Eckardstein, ‘they shouted all the more loudly that, whatever else it was, it was German and must remain forever German.’
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The German press suddenly discovered Samoa to be essential for national prestige and security.
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Yet public opinion is often volatile. Think of the sudden change in the United States in 1972 when President Nixon went to Beijing and China went from being a bitter enemy to a new friend. When Queen Victoria had her last fatal illness, the Kaiser rushed to her side even though the Boer War was still on and his government feared that he might meet a hostile reception. He held her in his arms for two and a half hours as she died and later claimed that he helped his uncle, now King Edward VII, lift her into her coffin. She was, he remembered, ‘so little – and so light’.
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The
Daily Mail
called Wilhelm ‘a friend in need’ and
The Times
said he would have an ‘abiding place in their memories and affections’. The
Telegraph
reminded its readers that he was half-English: ‘We have never lost our secret pride in the fact that the most striking and gifted personality born to any European throne since Frederick the Great was largely of our own blood.’ At a lunch before he left, Wilhelm made a plea for
friendship: ‘We ought to form an Anglo-German alliance, you to keep the seas, while we would be responsible for the land; with such an alliance not a mouse could stir in Europe without our permission.’
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Economic competition, a troubled relationship with mutual suspicions and occasional open hostility, the pressures of public opinion, all these help to explain why the Kaiser’s wishes did not materialise and why Germany and Britain followed diverging paths before 1914. Yet if Germany and Austria-Hungary had become enemies again (as they had been until 1866) or if Britain had gone to war with France, it would be just as easy to find similar factors at work. And if Germany and Britain had formed an alliance, it would be as easy to find explanations for that. So, when all that is said, the question remains. Why did Germany and Britain become such antagonists?

Part of the explanation lies in the way Germany was governed, which gave too much power to the complicated and bewildering character who sat at its summit from 1888 until 1918 when he was forced to abdicate. Wilhelm II was blamed in Allied propaganda for starting the Great War and indeed the victorious allies at Paris for a time contemplated bringing him to trial. That was probably unfair: Wilhelm did not want a general European war and in the crisis of 1914 as well as previous ones his inclination was to preserve the peace. Count Lerchenfeld, the perceptive representative of Bavaria in Berlin before the Great War, believed that he was well intentioned – ‘Kaiser Wilhelm erred but he did not sin’ – but that his violent language and outrageous statements gave observers the wrong impression.
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Nevertheless, he made a crucial contribution to the steps by which Europe turned into two heavily armed hostile camps. When he decided to build a navy to challenge British sea power, he drove a wedge between Germany and Britain and from that much else followed. Moreover, Wilhelm’s erratic behaviour, his changeable enthusiasms and his propensity to talk too much and without thinking first helped to create an impression of a dangerous Germany, a maverick that would not play the international game and which was bent on dominating the world.

Emperor of the Germans, the king of Prussia, first among his fellow German monarchs, the descendant of the great warrior-king Frederick the Great, and grandson of his namesake Wilhelm I in whose reign Germany came into being, Wilhelm II wanted to dominate not just the
German but the world’s stage. He was naturally restless and fidgety, his features animated and his expressions changing rapidly. ‘To have a conversation with him’, said Baron Beyens, the Belgian ambassador in Berlin before the Great War, ‘means to play the part of a listener, to allow him time to unfold his ideas in lively fashion, while from time to time one ventures upon a remark on which his quick mind, flitting readily from one subject to another, seizes with avidity.’
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When something amused him Wilhelm laughed loudly and when he was annoyed his eyes flashed ‘like steel’.

He was handsome, with fair hair, soft fresh skin and grey eyes. In public he played the part of ruler quite well, in his variety of military uniforms and his flashy rings and bracelets and with his erect soldier’s bearing. Like Frederick the Great and his grandfather, he barked out orders and scribbled terse and often rude comments – ‘stale fish’, ‘rubbish’, ‘nonsense’ – on documents. He composed his features into a stern mask and his eyes were cold; the famous moustaches with their aggressive tilt were fixed into place every morning by his personal barber. ‘We ask ourselves’, remarked Beyens, ‘with a touch of anxiety, whether the man we have just seen is really convinced of what he says, or whether he is the most striking actor that has appeared on the political stage of our day.’
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Wilhelm was an actor and one who secretly suspected that he was not up to the demanding role he had to play. The long-serving French ambassador in Berlin, Jules Cambon, felt that ‘H.M. had to make a great effort, and a very great effort, to maintain the severe and dignified attitude befitting a sovereign and that it was a great relief to him when the official part of the audience was over, to relax and indulge in agreeable and even jocose conversation which he believed to be much more in common with H.M.’s real nature.’
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He had, thought Albert Hopman, a naval aide who was usually inclined to be sycophantic, ‘somewhat a feminine tilt to his character, because he is lacking logic, businesslike manner, and a true inner manly hardness’.
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Walther Rathenau, the highly intelligent and perceptive German industrialist, was amazed at the contrast between the private and the public man when he was first introduced to the Kaiser. He saw a man trying hard to show a forceful dominance which did not come naturally: ‘a nature directed against itself, unsuspecting. Many have seen this besides me: neediness,
softness, a longing for people, a childlike nature ravished, these were palpable behind the athletic feats, high tension and resounding activity.’
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In that, Wilhelm was also like Frederick the Great. Both men had gentle, sensitive, and intellectual sides which they felt their circumstances obliged them to smother. While Wilhelm did not have Frederick’s exquisite taste, he loved designing buildings (admittedly rather ugly and grandiose ones). In his later years he developed a passion for archaeology and dragged his unfortunate court off for weeks on end to Corfu, where he had a dig. On the other hand he did not like modern art or literature. ‘That’s a nice snake I’ve reared in my bosom,’ he exclaimed after the first Berlin performance of Richard Strauss’s
Salome
.
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The Kaiser’s taste ran rather to loud and brassy music.
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He was intelligent with an excellent memory and liked to engage with ideas. ‘Again and again one cannot help wondering’, wrote a long-suffering official in his household, ‘at the remarkable closeness with which the Emperor watches every modern tendency and all progress. Today it is radium; tomorrow it will be the excavations in Babylon; and perhaps the next day he will discourse on free and unprejudiced scientific research.’
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He was also a good Christian and gave sermons when the mood took him, full, said Hopman of one effort, ‘of mysticism and crass orthodoxy’.
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Wilhelm had a tendency, largely unchecked because of who he was, to know it all. He told his uncle, Edward, how the British should conduct the Boer War and sent sketches for battleships to his Navy Office. (He also gave the British navy much unsolicited advice.)
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He told conductors how to conduct and painters how to paint. As Edward said unkindly, he was ‘the most brilliant failure in history’.
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He did not like being contradicted and did his best to avoid those who disagreed with him or wanted to give him unwelcome news. As the diplomat Alfred von Kiderlen-Wächter said to Holstein in 1891, ‘He just talks himself into an opinion … Anyone in favor of it is then quoted as an authority; anyone who differs from it “is being fooled”.’
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For the most part, those who were part of Wilhelm’s court and his closest official advisers learned to humour their master. ‘The higher we go the worse this intriguing and servility naturally become,’ said Count Robert Zedlitz-Trützschler, for seven years the Controller of the Kaiser’s
Household, ‘for it is at the top that one has most to fear and most to hope. Everybody in the immediate neighbourhood of the Emperor in time becomes, to all intents and purposes, his slave.’
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